Reading The Man from UNCLE tie-in collection

Intrigued by the section on the various tie-in novels in C.W. Walker's book Work/Text: Investigating The Man from UNCLE (which goes into the subject in quite a bit more detail than Heitland's earlier book on the series), I had a bit of a poke around the web to see whether any were available online. What I discovered, largely by accident, is that more or less the entire collection of novels and magazine stories and those from the Girl from UNCLE series can indeed be found in text format on the web. Some can be found transcribed by fans here, while others will require you to be willing to poke through assorted variously dodgey-looking download sites to acquire (seriously, though I have done my best to check, I cannot 100% guarantee I have not picked up a load of nasty malware in the process of finding all these, which is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to link to some of my sources. That said, if anyone would like me to send them the complete batch, drop me a line).

Many of these books can still be got second hand on ebay and other various sites around the web nowadays, though as the physical books are long out of print and the authors never received royalties from them as it was, it's hard to feel too terrible about the minor case of piracy required to snag the full collection. More importantly, having them in digital format makes the collection searchable, not to mention easily cross-referencable, and wow, is there some telling stuff in the keyword and key-phrase usage in these things (or at least if you're of the kind of mindset that finds those sorts of statistics interesting to begin with, which it goes without saying I am). But I’ll get to that in another post.

For now, I wanted to make some notes on the ones I’ve read enough of to have formed an opinion, and write something about my general impressions of the series. But because this is inevitably going to involve me rambling a lot, the short version is that about the only ones I might go as far as reccing were those by McDaniels, and perhaps the one by Fredric Davies. Neither are what I'd call must-reads, but I did have some fun with both. For general reference, the Fans from UNCLE website also has a brief review of all the novels, though less to say about the magazines.

( Some vital statistics )

( And some more general analysis, because I never can resist the urge to write an essay or two )

( The Copenhagen Affair – John Oram )

( The Vampire Affair – David McDaniels )

( The Mad Scientist Affair / The Power Cube Affair – John T. Phillifent )

( The Invisibility Affair / The Mind Twisters Affair – Thomas Stratton )

( The Splintered Sunglasses Affair – Peter Leslie )

( The Assassination Affair – J. Hunter Holly )

( The Cross of Gold Affair – Fredric Davies )

( The Howling Teenagers Affair – Dennis Lynds  )

( The Beauty and Beast Affair – Harry Whittington )

( The Deadly Dark Affair – John Jakes  )

( The Pillars of Salt Affair – Bill Pronzini )